You're viewing posts tagged; "Author: Simon Lambert"

16 May 2012 4:39 PM

As forecasts hit fever pitch of Greece being bundled out of the euro, there was bound to be plenty of wild speculation – and a snippet doing the rounds is that holidaymakers should be worried about holding Greek euro notes.

Travel firm DialaFlight even posted a blog, swiftly removed, making some fairly bold claims about whether Greek euro notes would prove worthless if the troubled nation fell out of the currency.

It asked: 'Will other members of the Eurozone accept them? If not anyone holding Greek Euros may find themselves out of pocket.'

‘Greek euro notes,’ I hear you cry. ‘But surely the whole point – of this euro experiment was that everybody has exactly the same money?’

And that is true. The euro is a common currency, entirely equal across all nations, and while it is printed in individual member countries, wherever your note comes from the design is exactly the same.

But while the Eurocrats would have you believe that each of those notes is absolutely equal, there is one tiny crucial difference that lets you see where they come from. That involves a little-known trick I learnt about a few years ago.

21 February 2012 12:01 PM

Tesco's Big Price Drop has not proved to be a resounding success. My view always was that in a country where everything is permanently on sale and you can't move for signs shouting about that fact, this was hardly a way to stand out from the crowd.

We are bored of stuff being on sale, meanwhile the bargain hunting ultras, such as those who follow cult leader Martin Lewis, are wise to any price trickery and keen to catch big business out wherever possible. So it was hardly surprising the view that prices were going up before they were going down swiftly spread.

These famished devourers of loss leading products are also, I would presume, notoriously difficult to make money off, even if spending £56 on Chocolate Oranges you don't need is hardly money saving.

But if you do feel that you have to go down the Big Price Drop route, it might be an idea to actually be lowering your prices and not promoting the fact that you've put them up.

03 February 2012 6:06 PM

In the continuing - and probably sensible - absence of any words from Britain's favourite banking villain, we can't know for sure.

What we can work out, thanks to the public's ever louder voice granted by the modern digital age, and the banking and business lobby's also ever louder moaning - thanks to its inability to work out when it would be wise to keep schtum - is that he's been dealt some rough justice.

The banking and business defenders argue that if conviction in a court with more official authority than the high court of public opinion does not mean you lose your title, then crashing a bank should not mean Fred is stripped of his.

'It wasn't just Fred's fault', they say. 'Retrospectively re-evaluating deeds is a dangerous game. It's unfair to scapegoat one man like this. And so on.'

19 January 2012 4:01 PM

Forget buy-to-let, there may be more than a few people who read the story of the couple who bought the Whitney-on-Wye Toll Bridge, with its attached two-bedroom cottage, and thought I wish I’d invested in that.

The bridge cost £400,000 and is forecast by its new owners to generate £100,000 a year – and an 18th Century Act of Parliament when it was built granted it exemption from tax.

So, that’s a 25 per cent annual tax-free return derived from something that is also handily your home. That’s not just a potentially excellent infrastructure investment but also a prime example of the attraction of putting your money into a tangible object.

12 January 2012 3:33 PM

The battering Tesco shares have taken as spooked investors ditched them can be taken as a clear warning that 2012 has the potential for a nasty stock market crash.

Tesco delivered a trading update that was poor in terms of UK sales. The supermarket giant is struggling in its own backyard, as consumers cut back and analysts have been sniping at its sliding like-for-like UK sales.

Despite those local troubles, Tesco has been consistently growing profits at a robust rate and that has kept its share price bobbing along. What did for it this morning was a hint of caution on that.

It said: ‘We expect Group trading profit growth to be around the low end of the current consensus range.’ And thus the shares of one of our most successful companies, that many were arguing was already undervalued, plunged 15 per cent.

06 January 2012 4:52 PM

House price forecasts are a mug's game, that's something I've learnt over many years of being cajoled into making them.

Nothing highlights that more that how the property market defied gravity in 2011, with a catalogue of bad news failing to drag prices down substantially. In fact, Nationwide said prices rose by 1 per cent last year. [see the chart above]

However, the headline figures do not tell the full story, as they only measure properties that sell, or mortgages that are approved for buyers on them - they cannot measure what it would take in terms of price falls for all the properties sat on estate agents shelves to be shifted.

20 December 2011 5:21 PM

When Samuel Johnson said: ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’, he probably didn’t have an underground swimming pool for rent on the Hornsey Road in mind. But if he had seen this, he very well could have done.

There may be many bad things to say about London’s property market but its unceasing ability to amaze is not one of them. Today it surprised me again. This is round the corner from my flat: a luxury underground swimming pool for rent - yours for £300 a week. [Discovered courtesy of the excellent The Hornsey Road blog]

It’s not a house with a swimming pool; not a flat with a swimming pool; just a swimming pool for rent. It appears to come complete with a changing area, a swish ante-room, a raised deck with a table and chairs, and – as my eagle-eyed colleague Richard Browning just pointed out – a washing machine.

I guess if you wanted to you could live here, or you could just live the dream and have your very own pool.

19 December 2011 12:13 PM

‘Sorry, you can’t have a mortgage.’ Those are not the words anyone cultivating a homebuying dream wants to hear, whether they are a first-time buyer or a family moving up the ladder.

And for a heady few years, they were not the words a bank or building society liked to say either – instead preferring lines such as: ‘would you like to borrow some more to cover arrangement fees, pay stamp duty, buy some carpets etc?’

Now, just four years after that great credit boom started to spectacularly unravel, and took world economy with it, we have the British arrival of prospective tougher new homeloan rules in the form of the Mortgage Market Review, and people will be hearing the dreaded ‘no’ a little bit more often.